Ytwok Update
Ytwok UpdateInteresting that this thread kind of died...
Well, 60 days to go, how's everyone feeling? Airline bookings seem to be running smoothly into next year, 9/9/99 passed without incident, as far as I can tell.
I'd really expect any potential ill effects to start showing soon (or, to have shown up already). One factor I find especially comforting is that the stories about extra payment being offered for IT support over Hogmanay week-end have (in London, anyway) suffered severe deflation: from "a year's salary for two days" to, a "couple of hundred quid".
A straw poll here might be interesting. Of course you can't vote your way out of Y2k, but it should be informative to see people move around on the poll as their expectations change. If the majority move towards optimism over the next 15 months then that will give the lie to folk like CoryHamasaki who publish newsletters saying the geeks are all in despair. If we move instead toward pessimism then that should give us some reassurance that we're not the only paranoids out there.
Originally we had a scale of 5 but 2 & 3 were too far apart for some of our brave prognosticators, and for completeness's sake something seemed to fit between 4 & 5 too.
1. No Problemo: Y2k is hype generated by the media and a few highly-paid consultants. A couple of accounting systems blowing their tops aren't going to hurt anyone. If there is any trouble we'll be back to business as usual within a month.
2. Recession <= Market Hiccups: There is a real problem here, but it's not a show-stopper. We're going to see wild swings on the markets, maybe some localized bank runs, and some businesses will have mission-critical failures and go belly up, but we've seen such things in every business cycle. Y2k won't be any worse for the industrialized world than this Asian collapse has been. Full recovery within a year. PeterDeJager is here.
2.5. Severe Recession <= Oil Crisis: Some of the failures are show-stoppers, but thre are workarounds for most. People just go back to manual systems for a while - pencil and paper, human operators, flat taxes, 1950s solutions. Market crashes, bank runs, oil shortages and bankruptcies occur all over the world, but people have made contingency plans and large enterprises mostly come through okay. Think 1973. Full recovery within 2 years.
3. Depression <= Manufacturing Crisis: There is a massive global problem here. Embedded systems in almost every manufacturing and distribution network lock up. The utilities experience only local failures, so it's still not the end of the world as we know it, but we're looking at rippling glitches, chronic oil shortage, and big business failures across every sector. 1930's style social dislocation. Recovery takes 5 years. EdYardeni? & BruceWebster? are here.
3.5 Chaos <= Domino Effect: there are twice as many people, the situation is vastly more complicated, technological dependence more widespread, and GIGO flows so much faster than 1929, this won't look like that. A spread of conditions across North America in the 2-4 range, generally better in the warmer cities, but across the world some places (India? Japan?) may go 4.5. Strong chance of war in many spots (Taiwan?). Other places stay pretty much intact and perhaps even prosper with vast external demand for all kinds of services. Recovery time depends on where you live. EdYourdon is about here.
4. Meltdown <= Utilities Go Out: The utilities are waaayy behind on this. The lights and water go out in US major cities for periods longer than a week. The biggest cities burn and the freeways become parking lots. Millions die, millions more lose homes and way of life. Recovery will take at least a decade if a nuclear exchange doesn't make it worse. CoryHamasaki & TcMay? are about here.
4.5 The end of the world as we know it <= Dieback: Not only do the cities burn, but most of the technically skilled population perish. A few survivalist techies are left, but nowhere near enough to maintain 20th century resource-distribution networks. The 6 billion humans on the planet can't live without those networks and suffer a JayHanson-style dieback. Recovery as such doesn't happen, but a substantial new civilization rises among the survivors within a century. PaulMilne?, InfoMagic? and GaryNorth live here.
5. TheEndOfTheWorld <= Darkness Falls: This is the worst technological screw-up since the Romans decided to use lead plumbing. The utilities, manufacturing networks, telephones, publishing, and everything else that makes living in cities possible go out and don't come back for generations. War, famine, disease and cannibalism are global. Literacy is witchcraft and far-future archaeologists argue we were hit by an asteroid. No one on the net lives here.
Vote changed to 2.5 with the revised scale. But with some leanings towards 2 for the less technologically oriented societies, with some local pockets of 1. People with high tech jobs and a wall street leaning may however experience a personal end to their world. I agree however that many Utilities do not seem to be on the ball with this one. A railroad may not be high tech, but as recent chaos in integrating railroad systems has proved, they do have a big impact when they cannot ship the really bulk goods. Remembering that Markets are a SocialPhenomenon?, we do have to watch out for our old friends FearUncertaintyAndDoubt causing major market panics. --PeteMcBreen
1.5-2, revised downward with the new definition of 2.5, depending on what the media do. There will be few real problems: elevators won't fall, planes won't drop out of the sky, most factories won't shut down. I see no credible reason why there would be an oil crisis, nor a credible reason why we would have to return to pencil and paper. But media scares could impact the market and cause recessionary behavior. Y2K is a fear problem, not a real problem. But fear is real, unfortunately. --RonJeffries
3. Like Ron, I think the "real problems" will be fewer than others believe. But the market is 10% perspiration and 90% hallucination, so it will take a hard hit. In addition, I think ineffectual responses to the real failures will exacerbate the overall damage. This is based on my observation of ineffectual efforts at preventive maintenance (such as the reams of paper dedicated to efforts to "fix" report programs that merely put the date at the top of the page.) --KielHodges
2, with the caveats others have voiced, if more optimistic. I don't foresee real technical problems, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but let's not overlook fear. --JimPerry
2.5 Recovery 1-1.5 years, less social disruption than the depression, but significant alteration to lifestyles. --DenhamGrey
2.5 I agree that the fear factor is the biggest one. I honestly believe that the EuroTransition? might have a bigger effect on the global economy than Ytwok since no one is planning for it because their entire IS budgets and mindshare are taken up by Ytwok. All I can say is that I'm happy MY bank (Wachovia) has already started advertising that they're up to Ytwok compliance. --KyleBrown
2-2.5 We will be in a slump, but we will not be able to isolate Ytwok as the cause. Since markets reflect expectations of future earnings and assessments of risk, the current market meltdown is unfortunately timed. Ytwok risks may further dampen investments over the next year. I think we are with the bears until sometime after 2000. How far after that will depend upon the impact. -- MichaelFeathers (9/5/98)
2 A slump, largely due to fear and the various parts of the world where the infrastructure will fail. (E.g. telephones in Asia except Japan (where it is either the year 6000+ or the year 28, depending.) But banks, utilities, etc will keep working in the US, Japan and Western Europe. And to be non-PC about it, economically nothing else really matters. (Middle Eastern banks are not required to ship oil.) -- MarkSwanson
2.5 The more I think about it, the more I worry. Like Ron, I don't believe that there will be many huge failures. In fact, while I won't be flying anywhere (and may take a slight vacation to safer ground), I doubt that there will be much to notice in the first week. But there will be lots of little glitches and, in our interconnected economy, the ripple effect will be enormous. I'd say we're headed for something between 1973 and the Great Depression.
And, of course, Silicon Valley (where I live) will be utterly devastated. Not so much by immediate Y2k effects, but by the resulting recession-- it seems to me that in a recession buying newer software and upgrading equipment are the first things businesses will cut back on.
--WilliamGrosso (wishing for job security and wondering whether to head for safer ground)
2.0 - 2.5 The FDIC said they will cover any Y2K losses. Now all we need is the YtwokEmbeddedSystems to fix their bugaboos and I would give it a 1.0. Seems systems are getting their ducks in a row. --AdamHill
The FDIC don't back sharemarkets or mutual funds. They don't back the foreign banks upon which US finance depends. They can't provide any remedy for the shortage of paper currency we'll experience when bank runs start. And they sure as hell can't do anything about the business failures that will result from a global manufacturing crisis ...
1.5 - 2.0 I already have an EU passport that expires in 2000-odd, it works fine. There have already been credit cards rejected by swipe machines because they expired ninety-nine years ago. My cash/charge/chechque guarentee card expires next year, it works fine. There will be problems, there are now, and have been for the last two years or so. I see them build up, peak about this time next year, then fade away again. The economy will wobble, but that happens all the time. It's possible that ThereHaveBeenAlready a few warehouses-worth of goods lost because stock-control systems saw an expiry date ninety-nine years ago.--KeithBraithwaite
1 - 2 I don't want to be in India waiting for a train to catch my plane to come back home on Jan 5, 1999. I expect a number of misprinted bills sent from one company to another. But all that falls into the inconvenience category, repaired by phone calls and manual rework and "excuse us" all around. I'll probably buy stocks late '99 because I expect them to go up when people find there is less trauma than anticipated. --AlistairCockburn
2 (2.5 for some parts of the world) I believe contingency planning will have a greater impact than some pundits believe and I expect to see some very creative solutions to problems that occur (a joke that I cannot completely recall that involves a farmer showing to deflate the tires of a truck that was stuck underneath a bridge and thus fixing a problem that had the experts stumped seems to come to mind). The problems that occurred at the beginning of 1999 were much milder than some self-described experts I heard on the radio had predicted just a few months previously. These people were predicting all sorts of problems for systems that looked ahead one year. As was reported a few weeks ago by various sources, the problems were rather mild. The success software systems dealing with the Euro transition is also very good news. --AlanHecht
Despite the nice press there have been some Euro glitches. Check out http://www.garynorth.com/y2k/detail_.cfm/3830 . Still, nothing they're not coping with quite nicely, thanks very much. And you're right, several pundits suggested 1/1/99 and the week after could be shaky, and so far as has been published they were quite mistaken.
I have some stuff to say about the Euro conversion which is straying from YtwokUpdate, so I am moving it over to EuroConversion.
What is also interesting about the Euro and does not seem to be widely reported is the fact that the Euro is a little bit more complicated than just being another currency to deal with (albeit one that represents several nations). Conversion to a country's currency that is transitioning to the Euro must be done be means of "triangulation", which means going through the Euro. For example, in order to convert from US dollars to German marks, the dollars must first be converted to Euros and then to marks. The same must be done for converting German marks to US dollars. After a few years, all of the European countries will deal exclusively with the Euro. I don't know how widely known this is outside of the financial and banking industries (I only know it because I work on financial software). As far as software fixes go, I imagine it is at least as difficult as y2k date conversions & fixes.
OTOH, every company that has forecast or admitted to any sort of negative Y2K effect has taken a terrible shellacking in the markets, so it seems fair to think that those that have had 1/1/99 problems wouldn't be too forthcoming about it. None of the worst effects posited here - social, control, or distribution failures, and manufacturing domino glitches - were due for 1/1/99, so that's not necessarily a very good predictor of what's to come. Still it augurs well for the many fiscal-year rollovers due in April; if April wears on well, we can probably breathe easy until GPS EOW rollover day on August 21-23
Please remind me again what bad stuff will happen on GpsEowRollover? Or point to it ... --RonJeffries
Instead of trying to explain it, I think the comp.risks archive is a pretty good source of information,particularly http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18.96.html#subj9.1
2.5 for me, mostly from embedded-systems problems and their side effects (and some nontechnical panic!). I would probably have been just 2 a few weeks ago, but I had a pretty bad dream, and a friend who's always been quite optimistic was lately convinced otherwise himself (moving from, I'd guess, about a 1 to about a 2). Such stuff as opinions are made of! *8) I will probably buy some extra canned food, and hoard some extra cash, and resist the temptation to do any short-term market trading... -- DavidChess
So on this scale I'll dob myself in at a 3. 1 & 2 seem to ignore the obvious facts about YtwokEmbeddedSystems, and 2.5 seems improbable to me because we no longer have the staff or skills to do 1950's things. I'm trying to prepare for 3.5, but can't accept it until I see evidence the last-minute fixes won't get done.
6/11/03 update Okay, so it took a bit longer to hit than I thought. But see, all the clocks have wound back to 1933. Depression, insane government, resource shortages and impending chaos everywhere. Don't forget, I told you so! :-)
Yeah, but that was largely due to the stupidity inherent in the actions of some Al Qaeda bandits on September 11, 2001, not the Y2K virus. I wonder if that really counts... RichardRabinowitz
2/17/00 update See YtwoKaboom ...
4/17/99 update I haven't moved from a 3 for six months because in six months I haven't seen anything worse than what I already knew. The latest GAO report on the electric utilities at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/ai99114.pdf is scarier than anything I've seen before. I'm sticking on 3 now mostly because I can't emotionally accept anything worse. But I'm going down to the farmer's market to buy an extra couple of bags of rice and beans. For the neighbors.
7/16/99 Dig http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/hearings/030599/gartner.html . Now apply the same grain of salt you'd apply to any executive summary of engineering estimates in your experience. In for a penny, in for a pound: 3.5.
10/26/99 Almost all the dates of doom have come and gone without more than a few very localized hiccups. Some Australian cities have had blackouts, but the power was back within hours. I confess my YtwokParanoia is starting to wear thin. I'm even worried about the YtwokBet. I guess I'm almost down to a 2.5.
1/1/0 As noted elsewhere on wiki, I'm very very happy to have been very very wrong. See speculation about how come on YtwoKaboom. I think I'm down below 1 - this is starting to look like a very good year. Provided, of course, the sky doesn't fall on our heads. --PeterMerel
1 to 1.5 on this scale. YtwokEmbeddedSystems just aren't the bugbear some people make them out to be. Ask people who actually design the systems (hardware and software). CoryHamasaki is the only person I've heard of who is concerned about his area of expertise. --LarryKollar
An excellent resource is Debunking Y2K at http://stand77.com/wwwboard/board.html.
[Discussion moved to YtwokMartialLaw]
For a somewhat optimistic and recent report on Y2K impact, check http://www.year2000.com/archive/y2ky2kfailure.html.
For a somewhat pessimistic and recent report on Y2K impact, check http://www.yourdon.com/articles/y2koutlook.html .
An excellent and relatively impartial review of signal Y2K stories is http://www.sangersreview.com/ . To get a feel for what's happening out there this is worth checking daily.
[Discussion moved to YtwokParanoia]
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